↧
Neuron Culture
↧
Jan 7, 2013
Polar Ring Galaxy
The stunning ring galaxy NGC 660 is the shimmering aftermath of a galactic collision, located 44 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. On January 7, astronomers announced that the galaxy was producing massive outbursts, powerful belches that are likely the product of a gorging supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. Using a network of telescopes including the 305-meter dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the team spotted five sites of bright radio emissions, one near the center of the galaxy and two on either side. Suspected to be jets coming from the galactic core, the emissions are brighter than supernovas when observed at radio wavelengths. The team plans to continue observing NGC 660 to determine if the jet hypothesis is correct.
Image: Gemini Observatory/AURA; Color composite produced by Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage. [high-resolution]
Caption: NRAO
↧
↧
stapel
title
In late November, three investigative panels issued the final report in the saga of admitted fraudster Diederik Stapel, a social psychologist formerly on faculty at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 2011, Stapel admitted to fabricating data; so far, his imaginative handiwork extends to 55 science papers and book chapters, as well as 10 graduate dissertations. The panel's report not only cites Stapel for bad behavior, but takes a shot at the entire field of social psychology.
As Science reports, the panel paints "an image of a "sloppy" research culture," and a field whose experts practice flawed science. Indeed, a section of the report titled, "Failure of scientific criticism" says, "Virtually nothing of all the impossibilities, peculiarities and sloppiness mentioned in this report was observed by all these local, national and international members of the field, and no suspicion of fraud whatsoever arose."
The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Psychology shot back, describing the Stapel report as "unacceptably flawed" and calling its suggestion that the field shares Stapel's flaws as "defamatory, unfounded, and false."
Image: One of Stapel's retracted papers suggested that a littered street was conducive to discrimination. (Bruno Alves/Flicker)
↧
dookhan
title
Also in the Boston area, forensic chemist Annie Dookhan was accused of faking drug test results in criminal cases. Thousands of them. Dookhan handled more than 60,000 samples related to 34,000 defendants over her nine years working in a state-run crime lab. Reportedly, she was the most productive of the lab's chemists. But instead of testing all those samples for the presence of drugs, Dookhan allegedly only tested a fraction, and then made up results for the remainder. The lab closed in August; since then, more than 200 defendants have been released from prison while their attorneys challenge convictions based on the lab's results. In December, a Massachusetts grand jury indicted Dookhan on 17 counts of obstruction of justice, eight counts of tampering with evidence, perjury, and pretending to hold a college degree.
(Joe Spurr/WBUR)
↧
Jan 9, 2013
Looking Down at Jupiter
These color maps of Jupiter were constructed from images taken by the narrow-angle camera onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 11 and 12, 2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during its flyby of the giant planet. Cassini was on its way to Saturn. They are the most detailed global color maps of Jupiter ever produced. The smallest visible features are about 120 kilometers (75 miles) across.
The maps are composed of 36 images: a pair of images covering Jupiter's northern and southern hemispheres was acquired in two colors every hour for nine hours as Jupiter rotated beneath the spacecraft. Although the raw images are in just two colors, 750 nanometers (near-infrared) and 451 nanometers (blue), the map's colors are close to those the human eye would see when gazing at Jupiter.
The maps show a variety of colorful cloud features, including parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the Great Red Spot, multi-lobed chaotic regions, white ovals and many small vortices. Many clouds appear in streaks and waves due to continual stretching and folding by Jupiter's winds and turbulence. The bluish-gray features along the north edge of the central bright band are equatorial "hot spots," meteorological systems such as the one entered by NASA's Galileo probe. Small bright spots within the orange band north of the equator are lightning-bearing thunderstorms. The polar regions are less clearly visible because Cassini viewed them at an angle and through thicker atmospheric haze (such as the whitish material in the south polar map)
Pixels in the rectangular map cover equal increments of planetocentric latitude (which is measured relative to the center of the planet) and longitude, and extend to 180 degrees of latitude and 360 degrees of longitude. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute [high-resolution]
Caption: NASA
↧
↧
Misbehaving Neurosurgeons
Misbehaving Neurosurgeons Are Banned From Experimental Research
Neurosurgeons experimenting on terminally ill brain cancer patients made the news in July when The Sacramento Bee revealed that two UC Davis neurosurgeons had been reported to the FDA and subsequently banned from performing experimental medical research on humans. After obtaining patient consent, the two surgeons, J. Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph Schrot, had infected three glioblastoma patients with Enterobacter aerogenes bacteria. Two of the patients quickly died from sepsis, the third lived for another year.
The pair had based their work on the controversial theory that post-operative “probiotic” infections can trigger life-prolonging immune responses. Muizelaar and Schrot reportedly thought the experimental procedure was FDA approved.
It wasn't. Turns out, introducing a biological agent into an experimental surgery requires additional regulatory steps. Muizelaar is now on leave from the university.
(Phalinn/Flickr)
↧
Retraction Winner
title
…an unofficial winner emerged this year: Yoshitaka Fujii, winner of the rather dubious honor of Most Retracted Papers, with 172 falsified reports. Assuming all of those publications are retracted the Japanese anesthesiologist will wrest the title from German anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt, who has racked up a comparatively paltry 90 retractions. In July, a panel assembled by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists concluded that Fujii had fabricated results in studies published between 1993 and 2011. Of the 212 studies examined, the committee could only find three that appeared legit. The fabricated reports described such things as controlled trials that never happened, using patients that don’t exist and medications that were never administered.
(Agent Smith/Flickr)
↧
Embryonic Bamboo Shark
Scientists studied how embryonic bamboo sharks respond to electrical fields mimicking those produced by predators. (Ryan Kempster)
↧
Juvenile Bamboo Shark
Juvenile bamboo sharks have distinctive dark and pale bands. (Ryan Kempster)
↧
↧
Juvenile Bamboo Shark
Juvenile bamboo bhark (Ryan Kempster)
↧
Adult Bamboo Shark
Adult brownbanded bamboo sharks may still have faint bands (ZulRosle/Flickr)
↧
Video
↧
Jan 10, 2013
Globular Stellar Cluster
This bright cluster of stars is 47 Tucanae (NGC 104), shown here in an image taken by ESO’s VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) from the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This cluster is located around 15 000 light-years away from us and contains millions of stars, some of which are unusual and exotic. This image was taken as part of the VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey, a project that is scanning the region of the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies that are very close to our Milky Way.
Image: SO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit[high-resolution]
Caption: ESO
↧
↧
Jan 11, 2013
Enceladus Jets at Sunset
As the long winter night deepens at Enceladus' south pole, its jets are also progressively falling into darkness. The shadow of the moon itself is slowly creeping up the jets making the portions closest to the surface difficult to observe by the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini looks toward the night side of Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) in this image. Enceladus is lit by light reflected off Saturn rather than by direct sunlight.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 452,000 miles (728,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 170 degrees. Scale in the original image was 3 miles (4 kilometers) per pixel. The image was magnified by a factor of three to enhance the visibility of jets.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute [high-resolution]
Caption: Cassini Solstice Team
↧
Jan 12, 2013
The Star Factory
This is a near-infrared, colour-coded composite image of a sky field in the south-western part of the galactic star-forming region Messier 17. In this image, young and heavily obscured stars are recognized by their red colour. Bluer objects are either foreground stars or well-developed massive stars whose intense light ionizes the hydrogen in this region. The diffuse light that is visible nearly everywhere in the photo is due to emission from hydrogen atoms that have (re-)combined from protons and electrons. The dark areas are due to obscuration of the light from background objects by large amounts of dust — this effect also causes many of those stars to appear quite red. A cluster of young stars in the upper-left part of the photo, so deeply embedded in the nebula that it is invisible in optical light, is well visible in this infrared image. Technical information : The exposures were made through three filtres, J (at wavelength 1.25 µm; exposure time 5 min; here rendered as blue), H (1.65 µm; 5 min; green) and Ks (2.2 µm; 5 min; red); an additional 15 min was spent on separate sky frames. The seeing was 0.5 - 0.6 arcsec. The objects in the uppermost left corner area appear somewhat elongated because of a colour-dependent aberration introduced at the edge by the large-field optics. The sky field shown measures approx. 5 x 5 arcmin 2 (corresponding to about 3% of the full moon). North is up and East is left.
Image: ESO [high-resolution]
Caption: ESO
↧
Allow Myself to Review ... Myself
Allow Myself to Review ... Myself
When scientists publish work in peer-reviewed journals, it means that other scientists have reviewed the work. Or does it? Sometimes, the “scientists” who reviewed a paper aren’t other scientists at all. Instead, in what appeared to be the trend this year, sometimes the reviews are provided by the paper’s authors or friends.
In February, journal publisher Elsevier retracted a paper by Guang-Zhi He of the Guiyang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China after learning that he had offered up false e-mail addresses and impersonated his paper’s reviewers. As Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch describes, Elsevier became suspicious after observing that many of the reviewers’ e-mails were directing to web domains in China — though some of the supposed reviewers weren’t in China.
In August, the same thing happened again. But this time, it led to more than 30 retractions. Korean researcher Hyung-In Moon, who studies plant compounds, had also submitted false reviewer e-mails, and then he or his colleagues wrote the favorable reviews. Too quickly, it seems. Retraction Watch reports that the scheme was revealed when a journal editor noticed that most of the reviews were coming back within 24 hours — way too fast. When asked, Moon admitted to his fabrications.
In September, more false reviews were discovered, this time of mathematics papers, though it isn’t clear who submitted the fraudulent contact information.
Image: Give yourself the thumbs up. (.reid./Flickr)↧
False Heart
False Heart
Another tale of the too-good-to-be-true involves Japanese researcher Hisashi Moriguchi, who claimed to have conducted the first clinical test using reprogrammed stem cells in humans. In it, Moriguchi supposedly transformed adult cells into heart cells, which he then transplanted into six patients with heart failure. Moriguchi, claiming to have affiliations with both Harvard Medical School and the University of Tokyo, presented the results of his “experiment” in a poster at a meeting of the New York Stem Cell Foundation.
Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported the accomplishment.
Scientists and reporters quickly suggested something was amiss. In response to inquiries, Moriguchi admitted he only discussed the procedure with five of the six reported transplant patients (he maintains the first actually did happen). He’s also not affiliated with Harvard University, publishes grand claims in ways that circumvent the normal peer review process, and includes “collaborators” on his papers who aren’t aware of the work being done. Subsequently, the University of Tokyo dismissed Moriguchi, and Yomiuri Shimbun took disciplinary actions against some of it news staff.
Image: Heart muscle cells. (akay/Flickr)
↧
↧
Jan 13, 2013
Cracks in Landor Basin
ESA’s Mars Express has observed the southern part of a partially buried approx. 440-km wide crater, informally named Ladon basin. The images, near to where Ladon Valles enters this large impact region reveal a variety of features, most notably the double interconnected impact craters Sigli and Shambe, the basins of which are criss-crossed by extensive fracturing.
This region, imaged on 27 April by the high-resolution stereo camera on Mars Express is of great interest to scientists since it shows significant signs of ancient lakes and rivers. Both Holden and Eberswalde Craters were on the final shortlist of four candidate landing sites for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, which is due now to land in Gale Crater on 6 August. Large-scale overview maps show clear evidence that vast volumes of water once flowed from the southern highlands. This water carved Ladon Valles, eventually flowing into Ladon basin, an ancient large impact region.
Elliptical craters like this 16 km-wide example are formed when asteroids or comets strike the surface of the planet at a shallow angle. Scientists have suggested that a fluidised ejecta pattern indicates the presence of subsurface ice which melted during the impact. Subsequent impacts have created a number of smaller craters in the ejecta blanket.
Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) [high-resolution]
Caption: Mars Express Team
↧
Jan 14, 2013
Crashing Mice Galaxies
The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the newest camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, has captured a spectacular pair of galaxies engaged in a celestial dance of cat and mouse or, in this case, mouse and mouse. Located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, the colliding galaxies have been nicknamed "The Mice" because of the long tails of stars and gas emanating from each galaxy. Otherwise known as NGC 4676, the pair will eventually merge into a single giant galaxy.
The image shows the most detail and the most stars that have ever been seen in these galaxies. In the galaxy at left, the bright blue patch is resolved into a vigorous cascade of clusters and associations of young, hot blue stars, whose formation has been triggered by the tidal forces of the gravitational interaction. Streams of material can also be seen flowing between the two galaxies.
The clumps of young stars in the long, straight tidal tail [upper right] are separated by fainter regions of material. These dim regions suggest that the clumps of stars have formed from the gravitational collapse of the gas and dust that once occupied those areas. Some of the clumps have luminous masses comparable to dwarf galaxies that orbit in the halo of our own Milky Way Galaxy.
Computer simulations by astronomers Josh Barnes (University of Hawaii) and John Hibbard (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, Va.) show that we are seeing two nearly identical spiral galaxies approximately 160 million years after their closest encounter. The long, straight arm is actually curved, but appears straight because we see it edge-on. The simulations also show that the pair will eventually merge, forming a large, nearly spherical galaxy (known as an elliptical galaxy). The stars, gas, and luminous clumps of stars in the tidal tails will either fall back into the merged galaxies or orbit in the halo of the newly formed elliptical galaxy. The Mice presage what may happen to our own Milky Way several billion years from now when it collides with our nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).
This picture is assembled from three sets of images taken on April 7, 2002, in blue, orange, and near-infrared filters.
Image: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA [high-resolution]
Caption: Hubble Heritage Team
↧
Scallop Opening Up
Honorable Mention: Broodstock Bay Scallop Opening Up
Kathryn Markey, Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island
Subject: Broodstock Bay Scallop Argopecten irradians opening up to take a look around and feed
Magnification: 0.63x
Technique: Stereomicroscopy
Bay Scallop, Argopecten irradians used for Broodstock in the Luther H. Blount Shellfish Hatchery. You can see the scallop’s intense blue eyes lining the mantle edges on the top and bottom valves. They are used to see light and shadows of encroaching predators allowing the scallop to swim away as needed. You can also see the scallop filtering the water over its gills as the particles in the water (live algae) are actively directed into the animal. This animal was removed from its tank and placed in a container of seawater and allowed to open up. It was then put back into its tank alive after the video was taken, to be part of the spawning population.
↧